Wild Food: A Complete Guide for Foragers

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He was Honorary Garden Manager at Eccleston Square in London and in 2010 was awarded the MBE for services to London Garden Squares. This all means that anyone wanting to honour his memory has a range of choices: he created a real live living garden plus a pile of brilliant books (he also made a wonderful online foraging course for the Idler Academy, and appeared as a guest on A Drink with the Idler in June 2020). The oldest recipe I try, from Florence White’s 1932 collection Good Things in England, and with an attribution that implies it may be Victorian, boils the nettles for 10 minutes before adding them to the soup base, while Little blanches his for just 60 seconds. Chef Paul Gayler’s book Great Homemade Soups sits squarely in the middle of that, at five minutes, while Phillips just adds the leaves raw to the soup, where they simmer for a quarter of an hour. Promotes an understanding of the key characteristics of important fungi families that will underpin all future learning Phillips was best known as an expert on roses and fungi.He was Honorary Garden Manager at Ecclestone Square in London and in the 2010 New Year's Honours Listwas awarded the MBE for services to London Garden Squares.

Phillips has been a natural nonconformist. Three months into his national service in the RAF in Canada, he says, he somehow persuaded an air vice marshal to let him go home on the basis that he didn’t want to be trained to kill people. He later gave up work as an art director at the ad agency, Ogilvy & Mather, to become a freelance photographer, concentrating on plants. His guiding philosophy has always been: “If it’s not fun, don’t do it.” That spirit has taken him all over the world – adventures in wild food that are celebrated in his latest book, The Worldwide Forager. Roger was an ad man before turning to photography, having worked as Creative Director at Ogilvy and Mather. According to Horticulture Week magazine, he deliberately set out to create a collection of books on plants as diverse as mosses, roses and annuals. His first book Wild Flowers of Britain was a huge success, selling 400,000 copies in the first year. Phillips warned against using his guide – or any other – as the sole authority on edible fungi, advising that novices should always have experts identify their finds. An excellent book for keen mycologists who wish expand their knowledge and identify rare species. Ironically more complete than Collins Complete Guide (above)! 8 Comments Phillips published books about trees and ferns and wild flowers before he got to mushrooms. He didn’t think the publisher at Pan would go for it. The British, he suggests, had always been funny about fungi. While across Europe and beyond natives would be out in fields and forests as if on pilgrimage in mushroom season, in the UK there was no tradition. “We were famous for herbs from medieval times, of course,” says Phillips. “But those books tend to refer to mushrooms as ‘the spit of Jesus’ or ‘the fruit of the devil’. Because they grew up from nowhere overnight they were associated with witchcraft.”He has learned a lot, too, from spending time with a Native American tribe, the Nez Perce, in Idaho, who retain some of the ancient knowledge of hunter-gatherers. Not only did Phillips increase his knowledge of edible tubers, he became friends with an eminently quotable chief: “How long will it take mankind to realise that you cannot eat money?” Some of the best fungi identification guidebooks aren’t especially interested in wild food – and some have no information on edibility at all. On the other hand, most fungi guides that are focussed on eating wild mushrooms tend to have limited coverage of very common, but inedible, species. Having only one such guide will result in some very frustrating forays! He went on to write over 30 more books after that, including The Worldwide Forager in 2020, and became especially famous for his work on mushrooms. He could go into the woods at the Good Life festival and return with a huge array of brightly coloured and edible fungi – and a trail of adoring fans.

Note: The original version of this book (published in 1981) called “Mushrooms and Other Fungi of Great Britain and Europe” was my first proper mushroom book, and remains my favourite. It is still available second hand. It is as good as (and in some ways better than) the 2015 revision that I’m reviewing here, though quite a few of the binomial names it uses are now out of date. The original includes a list of the 25 most common fungi found on British Mycological Society forays, which I think is extremely useful, but it was (sadly) omitted from the revised edition (I’ll blog it some time – and I feature many of its species my Webinar “20 Common, Poisonous, Medicinal and Delicious Mushrooms to Learn Before You Die!” ). The original version was a little less compact. The artist, photographer and author Roger Phillips’ talents led him in many directions, not all of them predictable, and it is entirely consistent with his roaming, inquisitive spirit that he will be remembered by many as a learned and media-friendly mycologist, a David Attenborough of the mushroom, and as the guru of the foraging movement. The milk means that there’s no need to add cream of any stripe to the finished dish, though it looks so pleasing against the green of the finished dish that you might like to anyway. Or pop in some stale bread fried in leftover bacon fat, as White recommends. Thrifty, warming and delicious: what more could you ask for at this time of year? Perfect nettle soup

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I suggest that, like the hunter-gatherers, Phillips must see a different countryside to the rest of us when he goes for a walk in the woods; so much to eat for a start … Not for beginners, but useful for more experienced foragers wishing to expand their mycological identification skills beyond the commonplace and edible. A real shame there are so few pictures/diagrams of undersides of caps etc. Great chapter on the science of fungi and introduction of specific genera (eg. Boletes, Amanitas etc)